Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele: ‘I Am a Legend’

Stylist Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele has long been a celebrity in the fashion world. Feathers in her hat include Anna Wintour’s first-ever Vogue cover, as well as countless editorials and well-known campaigns (Dior, Calvin Klein, the list goes on). But thanks to her recent appointment as fashion editor-at-large at Eva Chen’s newly-revamped Lucky (and before that, a delightful interview in HBO’s In Vogue: The Editor’s Eye), she’s getting more attention than ever. Flashy, French, and always slightly undone, she’s profiled in today’s Times as a “much-mythologized fashion stylist” who wears “Adidas track pants, with cascades of chains around her neck and her wrists, and fingers stacked with bangles and gobstopper pearls.”

Part of Carlyne’s charm is that she makes no bones about her fabulousness. “I am a legend,” she states matter-of-factly. As such, she has no use for trends or flash-in-the-pan street-style bloggers who stand preening for the cameras outside fashion shows. From the Times:

“C’est pas possible!” she will say of the scores of bloggers preening at Lincoln Center during Fashion Week. “Their fashion is fake. They want only to go with designer names and to have the thing of the moment.

“To that I say, ‘Non, non, non et non.’”

But she did say oui to putting Blake Lively in a leather miniskirt for the September issue of Lucky, at which the actress reportedly balked.

“Maybe she thought she would look like a hooker,” Ms. Cerf de Dudzeele ventured mildly.

Just the same, she succeeded in coaxing the star to wear it. She recalled the moment with satisfaction: “I managed to show her that she looked divine.”

All the same, they chose a more demure blue coat for the cover instead, which was probably a good idea.